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Wow, I remember when Journalism was an actual profession that required a real human doing real investigative work. Look how much more efficient we’ve gotten! Now we just write headlines that make sure to employ the words trick, weird and shocking and the word salad underneath doesn’t even matter.

Look, effects about access to information, especially widely disparate access to info, are very complicated. This results in Butterfly Effects that make economies chaotic and vulnerable. But we do have a solution to these problems you identify with unreliable or incomplete information being the only info available to economic decision makers:

We assume rational actors with perfect information.

Problem solved. Also, as an aside, it relieves CNBC of any responsibility for producing content, which is going to make their costs sink considerably: I’m putting a Strong Buy on them.

… The WSJ now has an online feature called “The Experts,” in which the paper features commentary from specialists and authorities in their given fields. Yesterday, as Jon Chait discovered, this meant giving ’70s-era actress Suzanne Somers a forum to attack the Affordable Care Act as a “socialist Ponzi scheme.”

The piece is a bizarre, 543-word screed, filled with strange errors of fact and judgment, culminating in Somers’s attempt to draw a historical parallel: “It’s the dark underbelly of the Affordable Care Act reminiscent of what Lenin and Churchill both said. Lenin: ‘Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.’ Churchill: ‘Control your citizens’ health care and you control your citizens.’”

As the paper’s editors later conceded, the quotes Somers relied on aren’t real….

Rupert Murdoch is dissolving the news. The now unrecognizable Murdoch Slime that passes for news is taking over the world.

Business Insider, Salon, and Quartz tend to be the worst that I know of in doing “hook-y” headlines like that (particularly BI). I don’t really blame them for it, since they’re dependent on web clicks to get the advertising revenues that support their organizations, and the competition for that is cutthroat.

I’ve read good pieces of news that had these kinds of headlines, so it’s not some indicator of the quality of the news article. Salon in particular tends to have a mismatch between crappy headlines and good articles.

How soon they forget. Rupert Murdoch is but a pale imitation of William Randolph Hearst of yellow journalism infamy. Remember the Maine! Perhaps a re-reading of Mark Twain’s “Journalism in Tennessee” is in order:

I’m glad to see this here because I have a question: Can someone please explain the mouseover text to me? I get all the ones in the main comic, but am stumped (and too lazy to Google) for that last one.

The “Physicist dad” in question is Albert Einstein. In 1916, he succeeded in explaining gravity in terms of relativistic physics; the resulting theory was called General Relativity. “Pics” and “NSFW” are comedic non-sequiturs.

The fads like this come from a few marketing “papers” that circulate widely. Since web/social media “lore” is so scarce the tips they come with seem to become like talismans to people.
What’s weird about how norms like this develop is how everyone could be so blinkered-ly doing the same thing to such a degree. Aren’t saturated markets and trends supposed to produce defectors? The hard turn away from the crowd to something new?
Doesn’t seem to work like that. Not with the speed you’d think anyway, since its often obvious everyone’s doing the same thing for a long time before some differentiation comes along.

Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaidensays

Why are the tips always “weird”? It’s well, weird — and also annoyingly repetitive. I think I now have “weird tips” for damn near every minor medical or body-image issue I might possibly suffer from, ever. There’s also a small army of women out there (or else just one woman with a lot of home remedies) who are/is universally despised by the medical profession, for taking away their business. You’d think the recognizable pattern would trigger people’s bogosity alarms (or at least, trigger the “eyes glaze over at yet another variant of the same stupid thing” reaction). And yet this ongoing campaign (I assume it’s the same people behind it all along) evidently makes enough money to keep running sidebar ads on half the websites I frequent.

Why are the tips always “weird”? It’s well, weird — and also annoyingly repetitive. I think I now have “weird tips” for damn near every minor medical or body-image issue I might possibly suffer from, ever. There’s also a small army of women out there (or else just one woman with a lot of home remedies) who are/is universally despised by the medical profession, for taking away their business.

I came across an analysis of those scams (and make no mistake, they are scams) a while back. They work like this: First, a soft sell – describing something as “weird thing you might want to see” rather than “buy our X!”. Alternatively, play on people’s desire to know secret information / sympathy for supposed underdogs. Once you’ve got the mark’s attention, run them through a long video further extolling the supposed virtues of the product, taking advantage of the human bias to become more certain of something with exposure to repeated assertions of it – even if those assertions are provably false. Anyone who has clicked on and then sat through the entire ad is someone who is less likely to recognize that they’ve been conned. So only then do you take their money and send them the fake weight-loss pills / first-100-words-of-German lessons / “free energy” machine (ideally on a recurring-unless-canceled credit card payment plan).

@27: I was thinking more along the lines of: “Geez, can’t these scammers come up with fresh-sounding slogans?” But as @28 points out: the current pitch is apparently working well enough, so why mess with it?

Anthony K.,
I am not decrying the fact that there are bad journalists, but rather the fact that there really aren’t any good ones. NPR has been dumbed down to the point where you are lucky if they tell you anything in a 2 hour newscast tat actually makes you think. Even The Economist is slacking, relying on standard journalistic tropes and reinforcing reader prejudices rather than challenging them. For all practical purposes, newspapers are dead, radio is in a coma and television news makes you stupider. It used to be that you could at least seek out good journalism. Now there is none to be had no matter how hard you look.

But as @28 points out: the current pitch is apparently working well enough, so why mess with it?

More like the current pitch has been created through natural selection to be the fittest of its kind. It’s not a “well enough”, it’s the one that has risen to the top over all of the other permutations.

That one’s not too far from the truth. I recall that when 1990 came, the media were falling all over themselves to declare that we were suddenly in a new era, as if the changing of the calendar had somehow permanently altered our culture (it didn’t; we had MC Hammer before 1990, and sadly, after 1990).